Category: Community

tl;dr:

We think that Hackathons in Africa are enjoying mixed results:
There are opportunities which are being missed by focusing on the wrong problems.
There are lack of skills around Shipping Product.
There are also skills gaps around determining the business case of projects / problems etc.

There are of course exceptions to this, thankfully (!), but by and large we’re thinking that by focusing on workplace relevant skills, and problems which can product viable businesses, a Hackathon could have more long term value to the people who participate.

We don’t think that it’s our place to take sides on specific Technologies, and we don’t really want to replicate what other people are already doing.

Which is why the Tech4Africa Hackathons moving forward will do 4 things only:

Focus on one utility problem which is local & relevant

Include collaboration technology and business case skills transfer for everyone

Focus on User Experience – this is the key driver for adoption and is largely ignored

Result in Shipping an MVP Proof of Concept

Background:

Maslow’s Heirarchy of NeedsInternet Heirarchy

We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what the opportunities are in Africa right now, and what’s clear is that it’s not going to play out the same way it has in the “developed” world until now. The reason is that when you look at the building blocks of the internet, there are clear un-met challenges which make those opportunities both different and harder.

When you dissect the landscape using Maslow as your reference point, and then you overlay that with the mobile market data, we think that the major differentiation will be:

most everything is going to happen on a mobile device rather than on a desktop PC;

whilst the rest of the “developed” world is focusing on top of the pyramid problems around self-actualisation, creativity, problem solving, authenticity and spontaneity (as memes for products), the African market still has pretty much all the layers of the pyramid left as opportunities, with the bottom of the pyramid still largely untapped.

When you dissect the opportunities at the bottom of the pyramid, you’ll find that they are primarily “utility” problems which exist in the lives of people everywhere, every day, in all markets.

For example: most diagrams will show “internet” or “wifi” as the base of the pyramid, and as such is probably the biggest opportunity (which is why the Telcos are so dominant in people’s lives).

Maslow in the Internet Age.

So this is what has led to our mantra of:

Want to build big tech product for Africa?

Focus on product with daily value for user. This is the utility & viability part.

Mobile first. This is the market demographic & adoption part.

Make it easy to share. This is the common sense part.

Make sure cash-flow has you in it. This is the “Don’t waste your time” part.

So, when you unpack this, we see examples (these are simple ones) coming out of:

Education: I want to add to or complete my education

Transport: I want to be somewhere on time / I need to inform my employer / I need a lift

Utilities: I want water / gas / electricity / housing

Personal finance: I want to make a payment / I want to send money to my family who live far away

Employment: I want to work to earn an income / I have jobs to offer

Information: I want to know what is going on around me

Family: Where are my family? Are they safe?

When applied to communities and devices (Internet of Things), some examples could be around:

Solutions:

So, instead of following the usual Hackathon experience you can find anywhere, our approach moving forward will be different:

We’re going to give clear direction on a product that could become a business.

The RHOK will focus on problems which occur in everyday life (this is where the business value is).

It will solve something which will mean people will talk about it (because it has given them value).

There will be a reasonable vision of adding transactions for cash flow, although this won’t be the focus for the RHOK itself.

Everyone will work together as a team.

The development focus will be on executing for mobile devices.

We WILL ship an MVP product in 2 days.

All skills learnt over the two days will transfer to the workplace.

And instead of focussing on the usual set of development skills (or taking sides on what stack to focus on), we’re going to focus on skills which enable collaboration in teams and shipping code and realising something beyond the Hackathon:

GIT (source control)

Continuous Integration (CI – easy stress free deployments)

App architecture (essential for teamwork)

App business case (just, essential)

We’ve engaged with Microsoft who have the vision to believe in what we’re doing, and they are going to help with:

Cloud servers on Azure – The machines will be small but adequate, and limited to the Hackathons.

I can remember what it was like as a young “digital” person in Johannesburg in 2000. The internet was exploding on the other side of the world, and (South) Africa was an afterthought (and still is for many), over and above being a small market. There were various attempts at exciting things, much like all over the world, but most of them fizzled and died, and that no-mans land between 2004 – 2009 was a worrying time.

Looking at the industry now, things are looking very different. Now has never been a better time for innovation, disruption, and growth.

If you’re in Africa, and if you don’t already know, you should know that there are circa 800m mobile SIM cards in Africa, which dwarfs the rather paltry 250m odd desktop PC’s.

And unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’d also know that the cost of mobile smartphones is just about at that inflection point where it becomes affordable for the majority of the mass market.

On top of that, it’s never been cheaper to start, test, and re-iterate an idea. Crisis, I remember the days of buying in $100k email servers just to send email! Imagine what you could do with $100k today?

For anyone reading this now, those three ingredients mean that for the first time in Internet history, we’re going to see a tidal wave of consumer technology and service adoption in Africa, on mobile devices, which I believe will dwarf the early oughts’.

If we’re really lucky, it will bring with it a surge in economic, social and political change too.

I say really lucky because for the economic, social and political change to take root, the benefits of this disruption need to be realized by people who are local and who keep those benefits local. If all the benefits are gained by people who are based overseas, then that trickle down, knock-on effect you see in other parts of the world, won’t happen. I know which one I want…

So we believe that there’s going to be 3 to 5 year window where local knowledge, local networks, local people and local expertise will play a significant factor in success. So where will you be when this happens?

After that, and like any other emerging market which is seen as a growth opportunity, that local experience and knowledge will be bought in or acquired, and then the opportunities will get harder and harder, and require more capital.

So if you’re involved in tech today, then now is the time to show yourself, to launch your product, to find that co-founder, to hustle those first deals, to look for that growth, to seize the moment.

There hasn’t been a better time in history, and there likely never will be again.

As for Tech4Africa, we’re going to do four things:

Be more aggressive about the opportunities we see as important for us.

Be more vocal about our opinions.

Continue to focus on catalysing the ecosystem through relevance, leadership, authentic content, and connecting people and ideas.

Roll out our model and platform throughout Africa, focusing on local tech innovation, startups and entrepreneurs.

And whilst doing that, we’re going to remain open to help and collaboration from anyone.

There hasn’t been a better time in history, and there likely never will be again.

Hadfield is presenting the lessons he learnt as a failed startup at Tech4Africa CT and Jhb this year. Says Hadfield: “Gareth Knight and I are continuing a little tradition that started at the last Tech4Africa… #FailCon. Trying to change that stigma that the South African startup scene has around failure. Like it or not, failure is a part of startup culture. Everyone forgets that 95% of these things fail. And yet we tend to hide failure instead of celebrating what we’ve learned. With the closure of Real Time Wine and the publishing of a certain blog post that did the rounds, I’ve unwittingly become the poster boy for startup failure! A moniker I’m happy to wear for a little bit, hopefully not forever…

“The point is, both Gareth and I are happy to share our failures – if it helps others succeed. Our industry could do with some more sharing. This will be a brutally honest fireside chat about the realities of startup life. Come and ask anything you ever wanted to ask about the messy behind-the-scenes nature of a tech startup. Hopefully between the tears, scars and cashflow issues, there’s enough in there to inspire more people to go out and start something.”

Hadfield has spoken at almost every Tech4Africa since its inception. “I’m a huge supporter and glad to help out any way I can,” he says. “This is OUR SXSW-in-the-making. Be there or be [ ].”

If you’re a first timer Hadfield has some advice for you: “As with any conference, it’s always more about the people than it is the content. In terms of content, pick topics to attend that are WAY outside of your comfort zone. That way, you’ll learn something. In terms of people, don’t be scared to say hi. Scan the # for interesting comments. Buy people coffee (it’s free after all). Say hi.”

A quick update on the Hackathons.Both Hackathons are all nighters – so be prepped for 24Hrs of Hacking. You can however join at any time.
Cape Town is tomorrow (16th August) at the Bandwidth Barn.
Jozi is next Friday (23rd August) at JoziHub.

Confirmed speakers (Cape Town and Jozi):

Cloud:
#DiData will have speakers on hand to talk through getting setup in the Cloud. They will also be giving away FREE vouchers for anyone attending.

Agility:
Patrick Turley from #Thoughtworks will be talking about Agility and the hard graft of getting products to market.

Mobile:
Ben Adlard, Product Manager for #Vumi at #Praekelt, will be at the hackathon to take questions and give away free accounts for Vumi. The entire core dev team will also be available on IRC during the hackathon to assist any developers with questions. Vumi is the product Wikipedia has selected to deliver content over USSD and SMS.

Product:
Gareth Knight, founder of #Wedo and #Tech4Africa, will be giving a talk on “Talk is cheap. Execution is everything. Product management in the ADD world of today.”. He will also be on hand to answer product dev / execution questions, and is easily bribed with good coffee and pizza.

We’re working on more speakers, which we’ll announce over Twitter and on this blog. Stay tuned, and stay classy.

Over the last two days since writing this and this we’ve had 1 comment, and many more emails saying that it’s great to see people talking about stuff that is not being said, and that we should do more of it.

When Tech4Africa started, our hypotheses was that the tech ecosystem in (South) Africa was missing a few vital parts. We set out to bring a broader perspective to folks living and working in what looked from the outside like a self congratulating bubble.

The overwhelming learning in the 4 years we’ve been working on this is that the landscape for techies / developers in Africa provides pretty poor opportunity for the talented person looking to really push themselves. In cities like London / Tel Aviv / New York / Boston / Berlin / Talinn / Austin and of course The Valley, the hiring market is so desperately in demand of technical skill and thus skewed to the developer, that the good ones are able to command great salaries AND work on the most interesting stuff in technology.

In Africa however the landscape looks different – although good developers are able to find jobs because the market is equally in demand for skills, the scope and range of work (call it interestingness) is for the most part very different. I won’t go into this in more detail because this is not the topic of this post, but what is important is that 80% of the developer conversations we have are around one central theme -> “I don’t get to do fun stuff at work” or “I don’t know what fun stuff to do“.

So we started the idea of a developer day at Tech4Africa (which I’m happy to say we only partly executed on last year, and will do better at this year) for developers to learn about more fun stuff, and then our Hackathons which happen during the year, for developers to do more fun stuff.

We subscribe to the notion that a Hackathon is “an appropriate application of ingenuity“, rather than anything subversive or nefarious. This is 2013 people, most of the most famous and recent success stories you could think of started out or resulted from a couple of engineers hacking a problem (think Mark Zuckerberg hacking together Facemash in Harvard, Daniel Ek working on the first iterations of Spotify), and “hack” is no longer a four letter word people need to be worried about.

And so, without going into too much philosophical detail, this is what we believe our Hackathons should and shouldn’t be about:

Hackathons should:

encourage fun, mirth and expression

push open source thinking, active collaboration, problem solving

be about new technologies, new approaches to solving difficult problems, and applying ingenuity

welcome and involve anyone in the community / ecosystem

be free to attend

Moving forward, we’re only going to work with partners and people on Hackathons that fulfull the four objectives above, and most importantly which build the ecosystem.

By building the ecosystem we teach younger developers to become better and more capable, we give non-technical people exposure to the way technical people think, we expose developers to new, exciting, different technologies which allow them to solve problems in different ways, and most importantly we build an ecosystem which is positive, fun and challenging.

For us the benefits of this are obvious and sorely needed in the African tech ecosystem, and we hope you’ll share that view with us.
If not, c’est la vie!

Last week we held our first Tech4Africa in Nairobi, which was great. We’ve wanted to do it for a long time, and so viewing this as a test run for a bigger event next year, we came away generally upbeat and excited about opportunities the Kenyan ecosystem seems to be presenting, albeit with some negatives.

What follows are our thoughts and observations, in no particular order:
Our contention is that technology traction in most of Africa will come from solving everyday utility problems in a meaningful way (think mPesa, Mode, iCow), and so key to this is researching, understanding and then problem solving these daily problems which create opportunities for disruption and thus wealth creation. From what I was able to see in a week of being in Kenya, there are real opportunities and there are some smart folks taking advantage of the gaps they are seeing. For the most part, opportunities seem to be a growing enterprise or corporate market that needs services, and then consumer problem solving with tech.

However, it seems that in Kenya most tech people (developers) are thinking about problems very localised to themselves (largely because the cost of travel within Africa is prohibitive), and so the markets which they’re working on are very small (ie: solving traffic in Nairobi is a local problem but probably not scalable or revenue generating), and traction is slow or non-existant. There are some thinking globally (using the app stores as distribution channels), but again the chances of success are against anyone in any country – the vagaries of the app stores are well documented.

Our audience was very passive, whilst we actively encourage engagement with speakers and lots of questions. Sometimes it felt like pulling hens teeth, which was demoralising. After learning this was normal and primarily the result of an education system which is based on rote learning, we felt a bit better (that it wasn’t just us).

Our audience had little or no idea of timekeeping and respecting start times or the time slots the speakers are allocated. That, and a few speakers running over meant we ended up running an hour late at the end of the day. Very frustrating. My own view is that this isn’t good enough, and is indicative of a mindset partially responsible for relatively little tech traction so far (the go-getters are on-time, hustling and doing well, everyone else is wondering why they aren’t). So in future we’re going to be more militant about timing and introduce de-incentivisation (like closing doors) to counter this.

Some of the local speakers were really awesome, engaging and clearly very good at their subject matter. This was extremely encouraging and so obviously we’re going to look for more of them!

In the end, we had a packed venue for the whole day, attendance rates which I’m told are standard, everyone staying to 6:30pm, and really good attendee feedback on the content, so that’s what we’re counting as success.

The most exciting thing I saw or heard of all week was the BRCK wifi device being pushed by Erik and his team. Really cool to see a hardware play coming out of Kenya / Africa, and with some top hardware folks working on it to boot.

USSD is definitely something any mobile developer in Africa should be skilling up on until the smartphone market is pervasive. That and Android. Backend architecture to cope with lots of small amounts of data input are still key however.

I feel the biggest opportunity for a software play would be “Data as a Service / Platform” which everyone can build off of. I’ll leave you to untangle the rest 😉

I didn’t hear anyone mention the business model canvas. I did see a lot of Facebooking.

In three of four separate conversations, we spoke to non-technical people who were looking for tech people either to partner with or to contract out to, but who were finding it very difficult to do so. They felt that Tech4Africa was a great place to meet developers, and commented that some of the talks they listened to were great at helping them with “bullshit detection” with some of the developers they were already talking to. So that was great validation, but also showed how we can add value.

All told, it really feels like the most limiting factors are belief, confidence and hustle; rather than technology, opportunity and market. At least three people I spoke to felt that a good success story was sorely needed to create role models (we believe that every tech ecosystem needs good and bad role models), there were very few folks who displayed self-confidence and the self-awareness to go against the grain and build something awesome – and they were mostly folks returning to Africa from Western countries where they gained their skills and confidence. Again, hustle and drive are the first characteristics needed for success in general – and we just didn’t get the feeling it was in abundance.

So, where to from here?We’ll be back in Nairobi with an entrepreneur bootcamp to help ‘treps skill up on business models, revenue models, presentation skills, and building teams; an action packed developer day to focus on mobile development skills; and a full day of inspiring sessions. It’s pretty clear that the best we can do is to offer learning, inspiration and networking.